This week has been one to remember for Irish tech start-up Profitero, and for Ireland’s start-up community, as Profitero has won the IBM SmartCamp finals in London, plus it has just secured a €750,000 cash injection.
Despite having just been set up in 2010, Profitero, which provides pricing intelligence to retailers, has already caught the discerning eye of big players such as IBM, as well as venture capitalists, such as Delta Partners, plus Enterprise Ireland.
And IBM certainly seems to think Profitero is one to watch.
Thirty-year-old Volodymyr Pigrukh, 29-year-old Dmitry Vysotski and Kanstantsin Chernysh are the founders of Profitero.
The founders have converged from rich technological backgrounds, as they built their expertise while working at Google, IBM and Microsoft in Dublin.
As well as having its headquarters in Dublin, Profitero has offices in Belarus. It won the European Seedcamp 2010 competition and was a finalist of Dublin Web Summit 2010. It also claimed the 2010 Irish Innovation Cubed award.
But what exactly is Profitero’s offering? The company has developed a next-generation pricing intelligence service for retailers for monitoring their competitors’ prices, stock availability and shipping charges. Some of its high-profile customers include Nielsen and Tesco.
Profitero’s founders say their solution simplifies and significantly speeds up the process of collecting and assessing this data. The service can be used by both online and offline retailers.
The Profitero platform monitors 27.5m products across 2,500 retail websites and the company hopes to grow this number to 100m by the end of 2011.
